Moritz Stefaner calls himself a “Truth and Beauty Operator”. But if you don't understand what that means, he'll translate to the safer “Freelance information Visualizer” and explain that “Large companies approach me with large data sets they want visualized. I take their data and turn it into something beautiful.”

George Colony, the CEO of analyst firm Forrester says Apple's best days are behind it and suggests the company is headed for the kind of slump that befell Sony and Disney when their visionary leaders departed.

It's been a big week for cloud storage. First Microsoft updated SkyDrive. Then Google, after years of speculation, parted the clouds to reveal Google Drive, even if it remained out of reach to some mere mortals using Macs.

China played the green card yesterday in an apparent bid to settle the on-going dispute over its throttling of rare earth exports, offering foreign firms the chance to co-develop the industry there in a more environmentally-friendly manner.

"Tech City can be a catalyst that improves the lives of the whole area, the city, the country and in fact the whole world," the Prime Minister's ambassador to Tech City told Queen Mary University's Mile End Group in a lecture this week.

Tim Luke, a policy adviser to Number 10, wants Blighty's government IT contracts spread more broadly and punting more money towards companies that don't to sell out abroad. He also thinks kids should be taught to code like real men.

Oracle Recovery Manager (RMAN) has been integrated with Data Domain Boost by EMC, which claims it ramps up backup performance by up to 50 per cent and cuts LAN bandwidth requirements by up to 99 per cent.

iOS App of the WeekThere have been a lot of rumours recently about Microsoft launching a version of Office for the iPad. I doubt it - it would amount to a pre-admission of the failure of Windows 8 on tablets.

Opera made the latest version of the its desktop browser available this morning in a beta release. Old hands may notice a few things missing in version 12.0. Voice-control support in the user interface has been axed, along with Opera Unite and widgets. The browser company wants developers to use the extensions API instead.

Despite blanketing Cambridge with trials, and White Space kit becoming legal in the USA, the White Space Summit in Duxford yesterday was still focusing on trying to convince the world that the technology will change everything – and for the better.

Customers logging into "secure and efficient payment service" Sage Pay this morning were served up an error message saying that the site could not be trusted, and didn't have a valid security certificate.

The UK government's technology shopping catalogue G-Cloud is creeping through the corridors of power - but a wave of outsourcing decisions has sapped Whitehall’s ability to set the nation's tech strategy, and the entrenched interests of incumbent IT suppliers stand in its way.

Children arriving at A&E are having their drug dosages calculated with a £1.59 iOS app which has not been certified and whose use is not monitored. It has been downloaded more than 500,000 times. This statistic was offered as an example of the development of "electronic health" technology at present at the Future World Symposium in London this week.

Emulex's latest earnings show a fall compared to the previous quarter: which was the first profitable quarter after six loss-making ones. This means execs at the networking giant are probably on high alert for any further signs of a return to that slough of despond.

The UK's Health Protection Agency has examined the evidence for mobile phones causing cancer, and concluded that there isn't any, but left plenty of wriggle room for naysayers and doom merchants, not to mention headline writers.

Blocks and FilesViolin Memory might well become the next platform storage company. But to do that it needs three product technologies and it only has one at the moment: its shared all-flash Memory array.

Hewlett-Packard has just rolled up an update to its venerable Unix platform that gives more virtualization options to more customers and better control over virtualization hypervisors and guests running on its Itanium-based Integrity and Superdome iron.

HPC blogIn a bold and unexpected move, Intel bought out rights to Cray’s networking and interconnect technology a couple of days ago for $140 million in cold, hard cash. Like our pal TPM said in his comprehensive story, it was quite a surprise to HPC industry watchers. I hadn’t heard speculation about Cray looking to sell any assets. In fact, given the recent introduction of their Big Data play, YarcData, I had expected any Cray M&A news to be about their acquisition of some analytics pieces to round out their offerings.

Scientists at the University of Southern California have developed a conducting fluid that would allow tiny solar crystals, just four nanometers across, to be painted onto surfaces and conduct electricity.

Women don't consider IT careers because “the popular media’s ‘geek’ image of the technology field” along with other factors including a lack of female role models and support at home and work “tend to dissuade talented girls from pursuing a tech career.”